allusions, in all the varied and exuberant imagery which they
employ. His books, more than those of his more learned
contemporaries, Richard Baxter, and John Owen, that "mighty
armor-bearer of the truth," as Bunyan happily calls him, were
written exclusively from the resources of his own personal
observation. And, in consequence of this, they have the freshness
and odors of the outer world pervading them--scents and sounds of
the highways along which, in the trampings of his trade, he had
plodded, and of the hedges that had shaded him. To use the language
of the patriarch's benediction, they have "THE SMELL OF A FIELD
WHICH THE LORD HATH BLESSED." His books are, like Walton's Angler,
of the open air, and the purling streams. You catch, back of the
good man's Bible, as he reverently ponders and commends it, glimpses
of rural landscapes, and of open skies--God's beautiful world, still
lovely, even though sin has marred it. Like the Sermon on the Mount,
Bunyan's page has the traits of field-preaching. And it was so,
also, in his references to the inner world of his own heart. He
wrote not from the dried specimens of earlier collectors--from the
shrivelled and rustling leaves of some old herbary--from the
philosophy and metaphysical analysis of other men's emotions, so
much as from the glowing records of his own consciousness and
experience, the fruits of grace and plants of righteousness,
blooming and fragrant in the watered garden of his own heart. And
this dipping of the pencil into his own soul, and into the freshness
of nature around him, is doubtless a part of the secret of his
perpetual originality and unsating freshness. Now, when men say
repiningly, and in a temper which impeaches alike society and
providence, that a lowly lot, with its necessary privations and its
consequent ignorance, is a barrier, perpetual and insuperable,
against usefulness and happiness and honor, we turn to the name and